Shhh!

You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud!

Just keep pretending our societies are equitable.

There are more assholes than good people because assholery typically delivers better results in terms of wealth, power, and status, and good people have to accept a lower social status in order to maintain their goodness, but most people don’t fall into either category.

But the vast majority of people fall into an apathetic middle ground where they don’t really think too much about any kind of moral consistency and act according to paths they’re already on and the rules those paths require.

$42 million dollars. Basically nothing in terms of Google’s bottom line.

They’re doing this because they WANT to.

For the same reason there’s no seahorse.

Talk about closing the barn door after the cows are already gone…

Not sure if maiiard, or if brain lying to me…

$45 million??? That’s a rounding error on a single day of Google’s income. I’m not even a little shocked that they have no scruples or integrity whatsoever, but I AM shocked how apparently CHEAP our democracy is.

Hell, it’ll probably cost more than that to IMPLEMENT this in any meaningful sense!

They’re going to get stopped either way. A flotilla of 27 civilian ships isn’t sneaking past one of the most advanced, heavily armed navies in the world, no matter how “sneaky” they try to be.

At least this way they’re on record for stopping the delivery.

Let’s not forget it’s convenient for conservative parties of BOTH sides to have some red meat to throw to their country’s nationalists. Normal, everyday people scarcely have the time or interaction to have strong feelings about another country whose people they don’t encounter that often, independent of history. But when you stir up your constituents to unite against an out-group, you can get them out to the polls and have a nice convenient threat to accuse the other guys of being soft against. They will become real friends when the real threat from China is greater than the political benefit of using each other to keep a united nationalist wing.

What could possibly go wrong with pushing the two most resource rich and populous countries in the world onto the same team aligned against you? I’m surprised nobody’s thought of such a winning strategy before.

"Hey! Welcome to the world!

Everything everyone has told you about how things work and the fairness of the system is a lie. Good luck dealing with that.

Also, all the adults who you were brought up to look at as the keepers of the world are actively making it worse and/or going insane.

You have no money, no power, no experience, you’re outnumbered and under-resourced, and those same screwed up adults have been actively sabotaging your mental acuity and development for more or less your entire lives.

So you’d better get to fixing it! What’s wrong with you lazy bums?"

What if what you want to do is be elitist about hot dog condiments?

I’ll drink to that, my friend.

Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.

Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.

“If you don’t have another cloud destination, don’t worry… we’ll automatically save it to your OneDrive account we FORCED you to get when you activated your operating system. Why no! You CAN’T turn it off! Also, we won’t let you edit your files without internet connectivity. You can never be too safe!”

Literally the ONLY thing stopping this from happening is they don’t think they can get away with it yet. I’m NOT going to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Toyoake in Aichi

I feel like all of this is a red herring.

How do Windows users fix a problem? They Google the problem and get the solution.

The EXACT same thing works in Linux. Has for a long, long time.

The only time it DOESN’T is when you either don’t know what you’re trying to do, in which case no power on EARTH is going to be able to help you, or you’re trying to do something so obscure and obtuse that a Windows user wouldn’t be doing it either.

What a thumbnail. Look at these proud parents.